Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Family Address  
Laura Madeline Wiseman

Lecture and Book Publication: Farmers’ Wives and Daughters Lincoln, Nebraska, September 1873

As arrows of sun pierce
the edge of the Great Plains
in Nebraska’s sixth year,

I stand at the lectern
and speak of husbands
who beat their wives

as their daughters watch
in this citadel of agriculture.
I don’t lecture on the violence

of the Civil War, or ether
cupped over a man’s face
to slit his throat, or even

suffrage’s rare gift to divide
men into feminists, tyrants,
agitators, and thieves.

As I squint I say, Have a care,
girls, whom you marry.
So much depends upon the man.

 

Laura Madeline Wiseman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she teaches English. She is the author of three chapbooks, My Imaginary (Dancing Girl Press, 2010), Ghost Girl (Pudding House, 2010), and Branding Girls, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her writing has appeared in Margie, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Blackbird, Arts & Letters, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.  She has received numerous awards and honors including an Academy of American Poets Award, the Mari Sandoz fiction Award, and the Stuff Memorial Fellowship, and grants from the Center for Great Plains Studies and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.